Flash drive size

[deanva]

If I want to put a region on a flash or thumb drive what size is recommended?

[Tarkus]

It would depend on the size of the region, how built up it is, and also whether or not you intended to store your Plugins used for it.

My most built-up region at the moment is 30 large tiles in size (6 large tiles x 5 large tiles) and currently, the whole folder is 282MB.  The largest, most built-up tile (with a population just shy of 400,000) is 37.1MB by itself, the least built up is 1.47MB, and the average (282MB divided by 30 city tiles) is 9.4MB.  The mean of the smallest and largest is just under 19.3MB.  To be safe, unless your region is really, really dense all the way across, 20MB per tile would figure to be a pretty safe figure.

Plugins folders vary considerably.  The one I have in use for that region is about 4.4GB.  I've heard of some people's folders exceeding 10GB.  My full-blast NAM 37 install on its own, by the way, is a little under 1GB.

I'd say 16GB would handle pretty much any typical region/Plugins combination without issue.  You might be able to get away with just 8GB or even 4GB if you're not dealing with anything large in either aspect.

-Alex

[Andreas]

It really depends on what you want to do. Is the Flash drive meant as a backup, or do you want to run the game from it? I strongly advise against the latter, since those "thumb drives" are not really meant to be used as working drive. Flash storage chips are used for various different purposes, and the manufacturers are testing them for the appropriate purpose.

The best quality goes into SSDs and high-end smartphones, meant for many read and write cycles. The ones that are not as endurable go into lowcost phones, memory cards and such, and the "worst" quality goes into those USB sticks/thumb drives, which usually means they are rather slow and don't hold up for a lot of read/write cycles. So in case you want to speed up the game, get an SSD, even a 120 GB model might be sufficient, and it won't cost much.

[mgb204]

Do bear in mind also that pricing, assuming you need to buy your USB stick, is such that certain smaller capacities don't make any sense to purchase any more.

Last year I wanted a couple 8GB USB 3.0 sticks to use as bootable drives for one thing or another. I currently have a bunch of USB 2.0 sticks, but just wanted quicker USB 3.0 ones. However, these days a 16GB or even 32GB stick is barely any more than 8GB. This is partially because the biggest cost involved with such products is usually the shipping, (from factory to distributor). So you might as well get a slightly larger one if it's not much more, since it will lessen the odds of needing to upgrade it later.

I'd also recommend considering including your Plugins as part of this, it would serve as a useful backup for your complete SC4 setup.

[deanva]

I am using the flash drive for backup of my region not running the game from it.

[Andreas]

Well, then check the size of the SC4 folder in "Documents" and buy a USB flash drive that is probably twice the size of that. Those things have become very affordable since a few years, and the main difference between them regarding the price for a certain size is the writing speed. If you don't mind that a backup takes longer, you can buy a cheap model, but even a 32 GB USB stick from a "brand name" (SanDisk, Kingston, etc.) is offered for a lot less than 10 bucks (both USD or EUR) these days.

[deanva]

I will use a 32GB Sandisk flash drive.